


A Friend in Need

by Sholio



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Families of Choice, Family Feels, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-12 15:04:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13549845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Steve is sick; the kids try to make him feel better.





	A Friend in Need

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FrenchRoast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchRoast/gifts).



"Are you sure you're okay? Because I could come home early, it's only a couple of days --"

"Mom. It's only a cold. I'm not a child."

... Steve had said, earlier that day. In general, he not only didn't mind his parents' business trips, he liked having the house to himself. He could sleep in, eat Oreos for breakfast, throw parties (mostly for middle-schoolers, these days, but nobody needed to know about that), skip class if he wanted to without anyone getting on his case about it (not a thing that mattered anymore, since he'd graduated a month ago and still wasn't quite sure what he was doing with his life, but that was a problem to worry about another time ...)

Another time, when he wasn't feeling like total warmed-over _death._ The idea of having his mom rush home to fuss over him like he was five years old made his stomach turn, but at the same time it might have been ... really ...

... kind of nice.

Not that he was going to die right here on this couch, even if it felt like it. He did kinda want a drink of water, and he probably ought to eat something, and another dose of aspirin might have helped his sore throat -- but all of those things were going to require getting up off this couch, and that sounded like too much effort to be worth it.

And now someone was knocking on the door. Pounding, actually, which seemed to stab right through Steve's aching skull. He rolled over and threw an arm over his head. The knocking stopped and was followed a moment later by a key rattling in the lock. Steve's eyes opened against the darkness of the couch back. This meant it had to be either someone who _had_ a key (a subset of people who consisted mainly of his parents, the cleaning lady -- and it wasn't her day to come in -- the neighbor who came over to water the plants when the whole family was gone, and Aunt Becky), or someone who knew where the spare key was hidden, which meant ...

"Steve!" a very familiar voice barked, and Steve wondered if playing dead had a hope of working. "Steve, you were gonna pick me and Lucas up to go over to the comic store in Halverson, where are you?" ... and _God_ , now he felt guilty about standing up the middle schoolers, because he genuinely had forgotten; what even was his _life._

"Steve?" Dustin said again, and then the thump of his feet on the carpet got abruptly louder and, just as abruptly, stopped dead. 

Which meant he was now in the living room. 

"Steve?" Dustin whispered loudly. "Are you asleep?"

"Yes," Steve croaked into the arm of the couch. "Asleep, possibly dead. Go away. I'll take you and your pint-sized buddies to the comic store next week."

Footsteps padded softly but quickly across the carpet, which really wasn't what he was hoping for. Then a hand touched his hair, very lightly in a way that felt like something crawling on his head.

"Jesus!" Steve groaned, swiping his hand above his head. "Go away."

"Are you sick?"

"What do you think?"

He hoped this'd be a sufficient deterrent, but Dustin just said, "Dude, you sound awful."

"Thanks," Steve croaked. "Go _away."_

Dustin poked him in the head. And then poked him again, until Steve cracked an eye open and glowered at the world.

"Hey, where are your folks?" Dustin asked.

"They're out of town. I'm contagious. Go away."

He buried his face in the couch pillows.

There was blessed silence for a little while, and he napped a bit, but slowly the sound of clattering and a muffled "Shit!" penetrated Steve's half-doze, followed by the smell of something burning. He sighed, rolled to a sitting position, waited out a head rush, and then lurched into the kitchen to find out what the fuck was going on.

And then he just had to stop and stare, because he didn't _think_ he was feverish enough to hallucinate. His parents' kitchen was usually immaculate; the cleaning lady came twice a week, and either they ordered in, or his mom cooked and cleaned with almost military precision. The most Steve usually bothered to do when his parents were out of town was live on bowls of cereal and occasionally fry himself some eggs.

Right now, there were cans and boxes scattered on the counters, and something spilled all over the stove and floor. Max was dashing back and forth between the sink and the stove, flinging water at the stove from one of his mother's tea cups, while Dustin had flattened himself against the kitchen island and was yelling something at her about not putting water on a grease fire. Lucas had climbed up on the counter and was trying to figure out how to unhook his mom's kitchen fire extinguisher from the wall. A low pall of smoke or steam hung in the air.

"What the hell are you idiots doing?" Steve croaked.

Max tried to stop, hit a patch of something slippery on the floor, and went down hard on her back. There was the sound of shattering china, then a very guilty silence.

At that point, the smoke detector went off.

 

*

 

Once they had a) turned off the stove, and b) found the smoke detector and taken the batteries out, Steve managed to figure out from their confused, talking-over-the-top-of-each-other version of events that they had been trying to heat up a can of Campbell's soup, had dropped the pan when they'd tried to take it off the stove, and had panicked at the idea that they'd set Steve's house on fire.

"It's _soup,_ dingus. It doesn't _burn."_ Steve was sitting at the kitchen island with his elbows on the countertop and his head resting in his hands. If his headache got any worse, his head felt like it was going to fall off. "And why is Max here, exactly?"

"Because she knows about taking care of sick people."

Steve raised his head and gave them both a flat stare. If there was a less likely person at Hawkins Middle School to enjoy taking care of sick people, he didn't want to meet them.

"... because her brother's home and she wanted to get out of the house for awhile?" Dustin said, twisting the toe of his sneaker in the dish towels they'd put on the floor to mop up the mess.

Max whacked him in the arm. 

"And Lucas is here because Max is here." Steve sighed. "Of course."

"We saved enough of the soup to put in a bowl," Dustin said hopefully, holding it out in both hands. 

There was no graceful way to say "no", and come to think of it, he was kind of hungry. "Fine," Steve groaned, as they put the soup in front of him, followed by a spoon. "Someone go find me some aspirin or something. And then," he added as Dustin pattered off, "you're all leaving, because I don't want to make you sick. _After_ you clean up this god damn mess."

 

*

 

They did clean up the mess, and they did leave, so he napped on the sofa while halfheartedly watched some of his parents' collection of VHS movies. And then he woke up to find Dustin sitting crosslegged on the floor with a sandwich.

"Dude," Steve croaked. "I thought we agreed I was going to get you sick."

"No, _you_ agreed that." Dustin pointed to a plate by the head of the couch. "I brought you orange juice from home, 'cause you didn't have any. And made you a sandwich. You're out of ham, by the way."

He actually was hungry again, so he propped himself up on his elbow and poked at the sandwich experimentally to make sure it didn't have anything weird in it like potato chips or candy bars; all bets were off, he'd learned, when Dustin made sandwiches. This one seemed to be pretty normal. There was something next to it. Steve picked it up and squinted blearily at it.

"What the heck's this?"

"Will made you a get-well card."

"What?" Steve sat up all the way. The card was drawn with crayons and said GET WELL SOON STEVE! ... with a picture of a nail-studded bat underneath. Inside, the kids had signed it.

"Wow. Uh. Thanks." He set it very carefully on the end table and tried to pretend his eyes were watering because of the germs.

"This movie is boring," Dustin complained.

"It's _Casablanca._ My mom likes it. It's a classic."

"It's boring. What else have you got?"

Steve got up to locate a box of Kleenex -- the cold had moved from the "feeling awful" stage into "head like a faucet" stage -- while Dustin rummaged through the cabinet of movies.

"Dude, you guys have _so many movies._ Your family is like your own video store." A minute later: "And they're _all boring._ How is this possible."

"My parents like old movies," Steve said, coming back from the bathroom with a roll of toilet paper; it was _almost_ like Kleenex, he reasoned. "There's some good stuff in there, though. Get _The Sting._ That one's good."

So they watched _The Sting_ (Dustin was riveted). Steve ate half of the sandwich, and then Dustin rummaged for snacks in the kitchen and found Steve's cache of Oreos. After dumping a heap of cookies for Steve on the end table ("I don't want your germs all over the rest of the box." "Hate to break it to you, kid, but I think that ship has sailed") he then flopped on the floor with the rest of the package.

"Shouldn't you be going home or something?" Steve asked, glancing at the darkness outside the windows.

"I told Mom I was hanging out with you tonight."

"Yeah, but it's like nine-thirty or something."

"Shit," Dustin said, rolling over and sitting up.

"Yeah. Exactly." Steve grabbed the roll of toilet paper off the end table. "I'm driving you home."

"I've got my bike," Dustin complained as Steve led the way outside. "If you get pneumonia and die --"

"I'm not getting pneumonia, and I don't want to explain to your mom that I let you ride your bike around after dark and get run over."

He actually felt a lot better, though the drive over to the Hendersons' was a whole lot of Dustin complaining about Steve blowing his nose in the car. ("It'd be a lot worse if I didn't, you know that right?" "Eww. Stop talking, Steve.") 

"So your parents are back tomorrow, right?" Dustin said as Steve pulled into the driveway. "You're not gonna go dropping dead with no one around to call the hospital or anything."

"Yeah, my parents are back tomorrow." He couldn't help reaching out to ruffle Dustin's hair as the kid got out of the car, which resulted in a scandalized shriek of "Eww! Steve! Germs!" 

"Need help getting your bike out of the trunk?"

"Nah," Dustin said. "I got it."

Except Steve remembered a minute later that he had to unlock the trunk for him; he still wasn't firing on all cylinders. "Hey kid?" he said casually as he extracted the bike. "Thanks." And he aimed another hair-ruffling in Dustin's direction, but this time Dustin dodged.

"If you got me sick, Steve, you're so dead."

As he waited in the driveway to make sure Dustin got into the house okay -- not that he thought Dustin _wouldn't_ , but ... just ... there were a lot of scary things in the dark -- the thought crossed Steve's mind that this actually hadn't been such a bad day after all.

 

*

 

**Epilogue:**

"I hate you, Steve," Dustin said indistinctly from under a pile of blankets on the Hendersons' sofa, throwing a crumpled Kleenex at him.

"I told you you'd get sick if you kept hanging around me, but did you listen?" Steve actually felt guilty about it, but there were only so many times he could apologize. Also, talking made him cough. 

"The soup's almost ready," Mrs. Henderson said from the kitchen. "I picked up a box of those goldfish crackers you love so much, Dusty. Do you like goldfish crackers, Steve?"

"Uh ... sure?" Steve was already tucked under a blanket Dustin's mom had put on top of him, and now she was feeding him goldfish crackers and soup. After he got her kid sick. It was a weird, weird life. He'd basically come over to return the favor because Dustin had hung around _him_ for hours when he was sick, and now he was watching cartoons on TV and being fed soup.

The Hendersons' cat jumped up into his lap. Steve decided to ignore it, but instead of jumping down, it kneaded his legs and then curled up on him.

"Oh, Tews likes you!" Mrs. Henderson enthused. "Cats are a good judge of character, you know. Who wants fresh-baked cookies?"

"Me!" Dustin said, his tousled head popping out of his blanket nest.

"Me," Steve sighed, and worked a hand out from under his blanket to pet the cat.


End file.
